A popular form of gymnasium wardrobe or locker consists of a sheet metal frame and a hinged, lockable door. Two latching mechanisms were available for securing the locker door closed. The prior art two- or three-point latch utilized a long vertical bar attached to a lift handle while the single-point system utilized a horizontal slide bolt. The scarcity of replacement parts for the plural point locking systems has seen these types being replaced by the horizontal slide bolt type of latching system. Although the slide bolt locking system is itself quite old, as exemplified by French patent 1,463,128, Nov. 9, 1965, the construction shown in the more recently issued patent of W. E. Lyng, Pat. No. 4,573,722, Mar. 4, 1986 is more commonly encountered. Both the French patent and the Lyng patent use a horizontally slidable, sheet metal bolt.
While both these prior art sheet metal slide bolts are designed to slide horizontally, the French patent's slide bolt is oriented to present its width at right angles to the door jamb while the width of the slide bolt in the Lyng patent is parallel to the door jamb. The right-angle orientation offers greater resistance to bending when the handle is forced than the parallel orientation. However because most locker doors and door jambs are not deep enough to accommodate a sheet metal slide bolt of substantial width, this type has not been widely employed in the replacement market. On the other hand, the vertically disposed width of the Lyng patent's slide bolt requires the use of two spaced-apart sheet metal sections which must be joined together at their ends in order to offer a sufficient moment of inertia or resistance against bending when the handle is tampered with. While the Lyng patent has achieved a certain amount of success, the need to fabricate all of its parts, especially the slide bolt, from sheet metal requires a number of costly manufacturing steps and additional finishing steps such as painting or plating.
The most common method of locking the lift handle on slide bolts of the prior art was to provide the slide bolt or lift handle with an aperture through which the shackle of the combination lock could be passed. It would be advantageous to provide a replacement latching system that could be used with either the U-shackle type of combination lock or with the permanently installed-type of combination lock.